community as a brand
“If you think of your home as property, rather than a place, and your community as a brand, rather than people, then you have decided to take a businessman’s approach. If you become a selfish individual, trying to extract value out of every person you meet, then you are a corporation. That is the logic of corporatism: Instead of creating value with others, you extract value from others, in a zero-sum game.” ~ Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview with Elizabeth Nolan Brown
But isn’t this overstating the case quite a bit? Most people don’t think this way, and yet we certainly have migrated to a world dominated by corporations and have certainly become more detached and less “community-oriented.” Before homes were thought of as “property” and merely as “places” this was largely due to the fact that someone – perhaps your feudal lord – could simply raze it to the ground or take it away from you. If anything ever added meaning to place it was property rights.
And who thinks about their community as a “brand”? Unless you’re being paid to promote tourism or business growth, you probably think of your community as a community, or a town, or a city, or whatever. Maybe you think it’s just boring. I think people have always grown bored with their surroundings. And unless I’m very mistaken, people who try to “extract value out of every person” they meet are generally regarded as somewhat sociopathic. I’m not sure it describes many people at all, regardless of the fact that we may all be, to one degree or another, selfish and self-centered. We always have been, I’d wager, and we likely always will be.
This isn’t to say that all is well in community-land. We could do better. We could build more organic neighborhoods. We could stop thinking always in terms of the car-culture. We could buy locally more often and more importantly, perhaps, even think locally. We could walk more and spend more time with our families and getting to know our neighbors instead of watching T.V. We could focus more on our local arts and culture and on the creation of vital, creative young minds in our local schools.
But this just seems like a stretch to me, to say the least. And I generally feel quite a bit of antipathy toward corporatism myself. I want to read Rushkoff’s book, and I’m going to have to read the whole interview as well, but I think I’ve retreated in many of my localist tendencies to a position which can be largely summed up with the phrase, all that glimmers is not gold.
Put this up on the main page – it’s way too long for “off the cuff.”Report
It was supposed to be…thanks.Report
But people do think this way, they just don’t realize it necessarily. That’s the problem, we’re all living inside corporatism to the point that we don’t even see it. Property rights are one thing, fixating on market values of property to facilitate debt financing (which is what got us in this mess, and continues to skew how we understand the economy) is another thing entirely. If you can make your mortgage, it doesn’t matter what the market value of your house is – its value comes from being your home. Does he overstate the brand thing? Somewhat, but he lived in a “trendy neighborhood” (Park Slope), and these places do indeed function as brands – as the opening anecdote about the response to his mugging illustrates.
To give another, here I live in Florida (though I’m actually north moving this week to attend grad school at Florida State), there are these whole huge eyesore “luxury” condo towers that are nearly empty, because they were built solely to support real estate speculation. Hardly anyone bought the units intending to actually live there. Beyond that, whole neighborhoods were razed to build upscale malls. Yes, they were blighted and impoverished, but building it resulted not in solving the problem, but simply in displacing the residents to the inner suburbs, which now have increasing problems with gang violence.
So yes, he overstates things sometimes. But not by as much as we’d like to think.Report
Fair points, Joseph. And maybe I’m simply operating from a different vantage point, one with a great deal less money or trendiness. I’m sure plenty of people do think this way, but I don’t think it’s at the root of the issue, and probably Rushkoff goes into this in much, much greater depth in his book, which I still haven’t read.Report
I’m not sure that many people think of their community as a brand, but I can see brand being a motivating factor in someone’s choice of where to live, just as brand is a motivating factor in what cars and clothes people buy.Report
True, for some people living somewhere trendy or “branded” may matter. Then again, there’s no accounting for taste. I prefer living in close-knit, walkable places, and I really do think that car-culture has unwound some of the better aspects of our communities. I think commutes, in fact, have done more to unravel “place” than thinking like a corporation has.Report
“…but I think I’ve retreated in many of my localist tendencies to a position which can be largely summed up with the phrase, all that glimmers is not gold.”
That sounds right. I never understood its allure, but more importantly, for me, I see it as myth.Report
I think it’s much better to focus on neighborhoods and on the institutions of a community – its schools, its business, etc. – than focusing on the somewhat more abstract and often Utopian vision of localism. I think localism can be a good starting-point but one has to realize all the downsides of local communities as well.Report
“And who thinks about their community as a “brand”? Unless you’re being paid to promote tourism or business growth, you probably think of your community as a community, or a town, or a city, or whatever.”
What he gets into re: this thought in more detail in the book is the way people, when confronted with crime in their communities, or blighted houses, or whatever other pestilence, get concerned first and foremost with what it will do to their property values (i.e., protecting the “brand” of their community) … it makes more sense in relation to the rest of the book. Rushkoff can be overzealous, but this was one of the points where I actually think he wasn’t at all …Report
Elizabeth – honestly I think this is more a matter of class-differences. I simply don’t live around very many property-owners and live in a neighborhood that would actually probably really appeal to Rushkoff. So maybe I’m just less-jaded.Report